(Sec. 2) This bill expresses the sense of Congress that section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934 was not intended to provide legal protection to websites that unlawfully promote and facilitate prostitution and websites that facilitate traffickers in advertising the sale of unlawful sex acts with sex trafficking victims. Section 230 limits the legal liability of interactive computer service providers or users for content they publish that was created by others.

By no plausible interpretation is Free Radical a website meant to “unlawfully promote and facilitate prostitution” or “facilitate traffickers in advertising the sale of unlawful sex acts with sex trafficking victims”. I’ve never seen such a post in the fediverse, let alone one that originates on Free Radical, and it’s certainly not meant for that purpose any more than is any other general public forum.

(Sec. 3) The bill amends the federal criminal code to add a new section that imposes penalties—a fine, a prison term of up to 10 years, or both—on a person who, using a facility or means of interstate or foreign commerce, owns, manages, or operates an interactive computer service (or attempts or conspires to do so) to promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person.

Same as above. I have never and would never own, manage, or operate a website to promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person. Regardless of whether prostitution should be illegal in the first place, it’s not something I’m going to directly participate in.

(Sec. 4) The bill amends the Communications Act of 1934 to declare that section 230 does not limit: (1) a federal civil claim for conduct that constitutes sex trafficking, (2) a federal criminal charge for conduct that constitutes sex trafficking, or (3) a state criminal charge for conduct that promotes or facilitates prostitution in violation of this bill.

Again, I’m not going to be promoting or facilitating prostitution. Note that this is different from carrying traffic that may incidentally facilitate illegal activities. For example, I guarantee that people use Gmail to do illegal things. That’s not its designed or advertised for, though.

(Sec. 5) The bill amends the federal criminal code to define a phrase related to the prohibition on sex trafficking. Currently, it a crime to knowingly benefit from participation in a venture that engages in sex trafficking. This bill defines “participation in a venture” to mean knowingly assisting, supporting, or facilitating a sex trafficking violation.

Key word: knowingly. I won’t be knowingly doing any of that stuff. I explicitly don’t read, monitor, analyze, or moderate all traffic flowing through the system. I don’t pretend to. I specifically don’t want to.

I side with the EFF that this is a bad idea and I oppose it. That said, I can’t imagine a plausible scenario where FOSTA/SESTA affects me – an American admin using American hosting resources – in any way. And if some dipshit prosecutor sees it otherwise, I’ll fight it. As an EFF member and friend to many a lawyer, I’m not going anywhere any time soon. These ridiculous bills won’t scare me away.

I woke up to the terrible news that our good friends on another instance had lost their database during a software upgrade. Godspeed and good luck in bringing it back online. We’re pulling for you!

The Free Radical site backs itself up hourly to a private S3 bucket, and keeps a month’s worth of these snapshots. It’s configured to upload all media files to S3 and serve them from there. In the event of a complete server failure, I could – assuming all goes well – re-deploy the software on a new server and restore from backup without losing more than just users and posts created since the last hour’s backup.

Admin tip: if you’ve set UID and/or GID in your .env.production, be sure to update Dockerfile with ARG UID=... and ARG GID=.... If you don’t, you’re going to get lots of permission errors in the docker-compose run --rm web rails assets:precompile part of the upgrade process. Don’t be me.